quarterstaff

a stout, iron-tipped, wooden staff, six to eight feet long, formerly used in England as a weapon

the use of the quarterstaff in fighting, often as a sport

quarterstaff

noun

pl.quar·ter·staves

A long wooden staff formerly used as a weapon.

quarterstaff

Noun

(plural quarterstaffs or quarterstaves)

A wooden staff of an approximate length between 2 and 2.5 meters, sometimes tipped with iron, used as a weapon in rural England during the Early Modern period.

Fighting or exercise with the quarterstaff.

He was very adept at quarterstaff.

Usage notes

An attestation from 1590 of a quarter Ashe staffe shows that the "quarter" was an apposition and could still be detached (Richard Harvey, Plaine Perceuall the peace-maker of England , cited after the OED). Joseph Swetnam (1615) uses "quarterstaff" in the same sense in which George Silver (1599) had used "short staff", viz. for the staff between about 2 and 2.5 meters in length, as opposed to the "long staff" of a length exceeding 3 meters.

Contemporary use of the word disappears during the 18th century, and beginning with 19th-century Romanticism the word is mostly limited to antiquarian or historical usage.

Origin

quarter +â€Ž staff, attested since about 1550. Probably originally referred to a staff cut from the hardwood of a certain size of tree which was cleft into four parts, per the OED.